New colors and fabrics helped to renovate the lounge area of a condominium building in Lake Oswego.

Featured Business
CK Hoffman Design
by Virginia Bruce

Just as some people are challenged by math, or have trouble remembering dates, some people have very little confidence in their abilities when it comes to choosing colors for their spaces, inside and out. That’s where Caryl Hoffmann steps in. Although she helps her CK Hoffmann Design customers choose furniture, accessories and more, she calls herself a color consultant. Whether a client is repainting their home’s exterior, revitalizing a single room, or decorating a business space, Caryl has developed techniques to guide them to color and finish choices that result in harmonious and pleasant environments for their families or businesses.

Exterior paint colors can express the owners’ personality and add value to a home

She started her design consulting business about 13 years ago, when her daughter started kindergarten and she could foresee the day when she’d have more time. “For the first ten years, my design work was mostly part-time for friends and acquaintances, and for our own real estate investments,” she says. “Three years ago, when Kayla was about 14, I decided to go into full gear with my business. I got a photographer to take professional photos of my work, hired a web designer, joined the CMBA, the Lake Oswego Chamber of Commerce, and the Asian Art Council at the Portland Art Museum (PAM), and started calling on paint stores offering to do free consultations for their retail clients.”

This approach has been successful on all fronts. She gets some clients from the paint store sessions, some from referrals through her PAM and C of C connections, and has helped several CMBA members with both home and business decorating projects.

She offers a “good, better, best” menu of services, starting with a one-hour simple paint consultation for $150 and, at the other end of the scale, supervising extensive remodeling projects from start to finish, including selecting finishes, furniture and accessories, managing contractors, and taking care of all the little details to deliver a finished project to her customers. For larger projects, she writes a proposal with an estimate of the total cost.

Caryl helps clients narrow down color choices using her CKH Custom Color Collection

She has developed her own set of paint color boards, the CKH Custom Color Collection, that lets her quickly and efficiently work with clients in narrowing down their color preferences. “In some ways, it’s a personality assessment as well as a way to figure out what they like,” she says. Once she and the client get “on the same page” about color preferences, she uses the Pantone system to choose the specific main and trim colors. She is then able to translate those into paint orders for her customers.

She has worked with Hunt Painting Company on a number of jobs, and recently began a formal relationship with them that allows her to bid the jobs. “I enjoy working with the painters. I truly appreciate their skills and they know that and always give me their best,” she says. “They have about 30 painters who need to stay busy, so they appreciate that I am bringing them more business. And I know that my client is getting a great job.” An experienced painter herself, occasionally she works alongside the team to apply specialty finishes after they have applied the base color. She enjoys the range of finishes available these days, including metallic and crackle glazes.

Her approach to color and design lets her help her client get a palette and selection of furniture and accessories that suits them. “I work hard to bring out their taste and preferences. We end up with things that I wouldn’t necessarily choose for myself, but it works for them.” That’s the difference between working with a professional and just asking a friend! She can also help couples to smooth out any disagreements over color or other choices.

Hoffmann grew up on the west side of the Los Angeles area. As a teenager, she was, “obsessed with all things ‘girly.’ Clothes, makeup, hair, and especially nail polish. I LOVED picking the colors (and still do).” She enrolled in a manicuring course while still in high school, and began working after graduation. “Back then, it was not as common as it is today, with nail salons on every corner,” she recalls. Her customers were professionals and people in the entertainment business. “I got a lot of tickets to screenings and movie openings. It was a lot of fun.”

She worked in various fashion and cosmetic jobs while taking classes, both at Santa Monica CC and San Francisco State, and then took a year abroad to study Art and History in Florence, Italy. “Upon returning, I took some interior design classes at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, before my acceptance at UCLA. At UCLA, the Design Major is designed to give students an “overall” introduction to all aspects of design including (but not limited to) Graphics, Film Making, Textile Design, Architecture, Ceramics, and Glass Art—the purpose was to give students a very broad design background before specializing in either graduate school or the professional world.”

Caryl designed the retail space for Eyes at Bethany Village

When she was about to start her senior year at UCLA, one of her manicure clients, Katherine Brustin Collins, of Brustin Collins Design, asked Caryl to become her assistant, which she did part-time while completing her degree. “It was a stroke of good fortune that I was able to ‘intern’ in the Interior Design Field. When I graduated, I already had experience in this field, so it made most sense for me to pursue this.”

After marriage, she and her husband, who also grew up in LA, decided to move to Portland because of the high housing costs there. “He was in the real estate/banking industry and I had tried selling real estate after working in the design field, and Portland was very affordable at that time. We flew up on Labor Day in 1988, rented an apartment, went back, quit our jobs, then drove up with two cars, two bikes, one cat, and enough money to last us six months….It’s been 24 years now so I guess were staying!”

Her husband got a job as a Mortgage Broker, and is still in the business, currently working at Wells Fargo Private Mortgage Banking. She began working at Smith Brothers, a commercial furnishings company downtown, “where I kept up with my design work and sold office furniture. Later, we decided for me to quit full time working so we could invest in real estate—buying homes, renting them and eventually selling them. I have been in charge of the day-to-day aspects of this, along with raising our two children—a son, Spencer, now 21 and a daughter,Kayla, now 17. I have built and/or remodeled over 15 homes. Some we still own as rentals, and some we have sold.”

Because of her years of building and remodeling, she feels she has more to offer than most traditional interior designers. “Most of them don’t have the contractor background that I do, so I can help my customers get excellent work and I can also manage the process so they don’t have to worry about it.”

She recently finished a project that started one Saturday at one of her Sherwin-Williams sessions. “The customer came in because they were expecting some out-of-town guests, and they wanted to update their powder room. They wanted a specialty finish, and the job had to be done by the following Friday,” she explains. “When we sat down in their home and figured out the costs, I showed them that for the powder room alone, with their ‘fancy’ paint choices, it would be $900. But because the team would be there anyway, we could also update their kitchen and family rooms with new paint for a total of $1800.” Caryl quickly assembled and worked with the Hunt team and was able to complete it all on time and on budget.

She keeps her business organized in her home office with baskets to collect important paperwork

She has been working with Lee Davies Real Estate for a number of years on her own houses, and gets some of her design clients from them. While the recession had an impact, she says the market in our area is opening up again. “And even during the worst of the recession I stayed busy, because a lot of people who might have wanted to move, weren’t able to sell their houses. So they put their effort into making their homes nicer.”

She works from her home office in Forest Heights, although she mostly sees her clients in their spaces. She has an assistant, Becky, who takes care of business details and errands. Her website was designed by Ancil Nance, and Charlie Kloppenburg takes photos of her projects. She has preferred providers of paint, flooring, and window treatments although she is happy to work with customers’ choices as well.

She focuses on clients in the Cedar Mill, Bethany and Forest Heights area, although she has done projects in Lake Oswego also. She’s at the Sherwin-Williams Murray Road store on the second and fourth Saturdays from 11-2 giving free 20-minute consultations. Visit her website at ckhoffmandesign.com to see photos of her work and more, call her at 503-807-1348 or email her at carylkhoff@gmail.com to schedule a visit.

NEWS HOME